Despite technology, Scipio’s dream-journey into space still seems to hover in the background for twentieth-century science fiction. For the character named Bedford in The First Men in the Moon, by H. G. Wells, take-off is less technological than psychological: “I had expected a violent jerk at starting, a giddy sense of speed. Instead I felt—as if I were disembodied. It was not like the beginning of a journey; it was like the beginning of a dream.” Similarly, the religious themes of Dante, Chaucer, and Milton reappear in more recent science fiction works like those co-authored by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (a NASA scientist turned writer): The Mote in God’s Eye and Lucifer’s Hammer. Even modern literature set on Earth may take a cosmic view:
Wait! One more look. Good-by, good-by world. Good-by Grover’s Corners . . . Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking . . . and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.
For contemporary audiences of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, our town is the Earth itself; but this Earth is no longer the shameful speck of Cicero’s vision. It is home.
“Colors startled me . . . an extraordinary array of vivid hues that were strangely gentle in their play across the receding surface of the world.” Gherman Stepanovich Titov so remembers his view of the Earth as he circled it seventeen times in 1961. The early missions went so fast, and were so filled with strict concentration on the flight controls, that the American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts had little time for sustained meditation on the Earth below them—John Glenn seeking out the buttons with the tiny red lights taped to his fingertips, and Yuri Gagarin glancing only at the Earth’s “very characteristic and very beautiful blue halo.”
When the Apollo program began in 1967, astronauts got far enough from Earth and had enough time in space to really stand in Scipio’s shoes. On March 5, 1969, Russell “Rusty” Schweickart climbed out of the Apollo 9 spacecraft over 100,000 miles from Earth. He was wearing a two-million dollar suit designed—by skill and hope—to protect him from the dangers of space. Unlike the Gemini astronauts, Schweickart had no umbilical oxygen tube leading back to the mother ship, only a simple tether. For this EVA (extra-vehicular activity), he was really outside and alone. As he stood in what they called the “golden slippers”—foot pads painted with pure gold to protect them from the searing rays of the sun—and as he gazed down long and carefully at Earth, he first told his companions inside Apollo, “That’s what you call a view from the top of the stairs.”
He was Scipio, he was Troilus, he was the angel Raphael. But what Troilus despised as “this litel spot of erthe,” Schweickart saw in an utterly different way. “There are no frames and no boundaries,” he said later of the Earth. “That little spot you could cover with your thumb—it’s everything.”
Behind him had been the light-year distant stars, the silent fire of the sun, the moon whirling on its path; yet the soft blue spot of Earth he turned to was everything.
There was a similar moment as the Apollo 11 lunar entry module started its final descent toward the moon. As the altitude of the module began to drop and Neil Armstrong’s heartbeat began to rise—from a normal 77 to a high of 156 at touchdown on the Sea of Tranquility—and as the last flurry of technical decisions had to be carried out, as the radio system began, for some reason, to fade at this moment, Buzz Aldrin fired off a sentence to Mission Control that had nothing to do with the potential emergency at hand: “Got the Earth right out our front window.”
It was Aldrin who later spent a part of the precious hours on the moon taking bread, wine, and a Bible from his personal preference kit, and celebrating communion. But his sentence in the midst of descent was less religious than it was a simple recognition. There was the Earth. So that’s it? Like the copy of Pushkin’s poetry that Titov smuggled into his two week stint in the space-simulation “Deaf Room,” a habitual idea like home can be tucked away in the survival kit of the mind. A long journey can produce a simple discovery. For James Lovell, commander of the aborted Apollo 13 (which was partially disabled by an explosion on the outward journey, then circled the moon and somehow made it home), it came to this: “We do not realize what we have on Earth until we leave it.”
If space-travel helps us to see what we have on Earth by seeing what the cold void lacks, then the astronauts follow Cicero in telling us something crucial about life on Earth. But their message has been read in very different ways. On one side are the advocates of what a third-grader, in a spectacular spelling discovery, once called “the plant earth.” Here we have Buckminster Fuller’s “Spaceship Earth”; the cover image and philosophy of the Whole Earth Catalog; and the contemporary scientists who see Gaia, the Earth, as a single organism maintaining its own life in a way impossible anywhere else. This is home. We must not defile or annihilate this planet, for we are inseparable from it. “It’s everything.”
On the other side are those who begin with the assumption that we will destroy the Earth, and that we must scramble into some kind of exodus very soon. Edward Gilfillan, a scientist once associated with NASA, writes that the Earth should be seen as “merely an overnight campsite along the way; confused, troublesome, unsatisfactory, but unimportant; an untidy place to be abandoned and forgotten.” The writer Ray Bradbury told an Italian reporter,
Homer will die. Michelangelo will die. Galileo, Leonardo, Shakespeare, Einstein will die, all those will die who now are not dead because we are alive, we are thinking of them, we are carrying them within us. And then every single thing, every memory, will hurtle down into the void with us. So let us save them, let us save ourselves. Let us prepare ourselves to escape, to continue life and rebuild our cities on other planets: we shall not be long of this Earth.
The most chilling word here is Bradbury’s tiny preposition: “not long of this Earth.” Bradbury could have said, “not long on this Earth,” implying that departure would be a movement from this place to another. If we are “not long of this Earth,” however, our identity is fully independent of it. Ray Bradbury is a careful writer. He knows what he says: the Earth is our campsite only.
And Pope Pius XII told Wernher von Braun (who helped Hitler, and later the United States, to develop rocket technology), “The Lord . . . had no intention of setting a limit to inquiry when He said Ye shall have dominion over the earth. It is all creation which He has entrusted to man and which He has given to the human mind, to penetrate it.” According to these views, certain human problems will not be solved on Earth, and the Earth may become the victim of our inability to solve them.
In Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, a character announces that “Humanly speaking, every possible precaution has been taken to bring this rash experiment to a successful termination.” Later in the novel, we learn that the scientists did think of everything—except how the projectile with three men inside might return to Earth.
“It is all very well to go to the moon, but how to get back again?” says one of the three as they hurtle outward into space.
“The question has no real interest,” replies Barbicane, president of the Gun Club which has sponsored the mission. “Later, when we think it advisable to return, we will take counsel together.”
So stories go. So our lives go, unless we take counsel together.
We need to take counsel with Cicero before his head is nailed to the rostrum,